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47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades
- 5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 2y ago[flagged]
- robwwilliams 2y agoGreat story. Talk about motivations!
- albertopv 2y agoBoeing could take notes /s
- Rebelgecko 2y agoMore like L3/Harris/Aerojet/Rocketdyne... They built Voyagers' thrusters as well as the Boeing Starliner's.
- greenavocado 2y agoThe German scientists that made the Apollo program and associated technology happen are long gone
- jhoechtl 2y agoThat was quality engineering!
- yashg 2y agoA radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. And it would take the same to get a response back. Incredible. And imagine the patience needed to send commands and wait for the outcome on the part of the engineering team. You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.
- b112 2y agoYou can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Indeed. We used to do this all the time. Cars without OTA updates, games and software shipped on disk or floppy or cd, all very make or break.
- DaoVeles 2y agoAn aside but this is why I was blown away by Mario Odyssey on the Switch. While it did get patches to add a few new games modes and bonuses, there was nothing done to fix anything broken with the title because there wasn't anything. If you buy a physical copy from the last few years, there is no additional patch to download. They had all the issues sorted out before release, very rare nowadays.
- gambiting 2y agoOh it definitely has bugs and glitches - tonnes of them in fact. It's just that Nintendo chooses not to fix them(not that they should, 90% of them are basically people actively trying to break stuff, although some I can see how you could do it accidentally). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYmV0bs15w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYmV0bs15w https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Super_Mario_Odyssey_glitches https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Super_Mario_Odyssey_glitch... And issues have been fixed in patches too, like the first glitch on that list that would lock your camera so you couldn't turn it - that was fixed in a patch. "If Mario performs a Cap Throw at Talkatoo and talks to him at the same time, the camera will lock into place.[...] As of the February 21, 2018 update, this glitch is fixed" But there are situations that will literally crash the game to the OS too: "In the Bowser's Moon Wedding objective, if Mario falls into the lava just as he is about to capture Bowser, the game immediately crashes."
- DaoVeles 2y agoThat's for that recap! (Pun intended!). I should have been more specific by being more vague. The game didn't need to be patched for the vast majority of its common use. I would be surprised if there are any games with a degree of freedom that you couldn't crash if you did just the right thing. But for 99.99% of players, they will never come across these things. What I should have said is that if left un-patched, most people would never hit a problem. But I really appreciate the heads up about all the glitches people are using, very cool.
- stevage 2y agoMultiple puffs of hydrazine every day to keep the craft stable, for more than 50 years? How big are these tanks?
- floppiplopp 2y ago100 kg apparently, supposedly providing fuel until 2034. Those are just very small puffs.
- throw310822 2y agoAbout 680 thousand puffs so far (40 x 365 x 47). Also, "When the team initially switched Voyager over to the trajectory correction thrusters six years ago, the tube opening was 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) across".
- Aachen 2y ago$ qalc > 100 kg / 680e3 approx. 147.06 mg Each puff would be <150 milligrams if the tanks were empty now, and since they're not... that's some small puffs! (Not sure what the USA weight unit is, stones or something? DDG says that's 0.000024 stones)
- irjustin 2y agoI'm so surprised it needs so many puffs per day (40?!) to keep the aircraft oriented at earth in space the vacuum of space where there's so much... vacuum. When I started the article I figured they'd correct for orientation once every 2 weeks or so.
- rob74 2y agoI guess it's not as much "orienting it in the right direction and then just keeping it that way" as it is a constant to-and-fro - the thrusters are probably not precise enough to keep it oriented towards earth, I imagine the range is extremely narrow by now?
- irjustin 2y agoThen the 0.035mm would be a benefit! more puffs! I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about.
- akira2501 2y agoThat's a 90 minute cycle time. It's outside the heliosphere now so the Solar winds are no longer a nearly constant force in a single direction. So it experiences more "turbulence."
- perihelions 2y agoAlso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41517272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41517272 ("NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive", 74 comments)
- piokoch 2y agoYou can agree with me or not, but Voyager 1/2 is a top technological achievement of the humankind. A piece of hardware so good that it survived working correctly 47 years in a hostile environment, driven by a computer with the power of modern car key. Amazing.
- atoav 2y agoAgreed, and to me as a electronics/software engineer it serves as a constant reminder that if you want things to be reliable, sometimes less of the right stuff can indeed be more.
- corint 2y agoIt's incredible. The engineers who designed and built those spacecraft were brilliant. I'll raise a glass to their work!
- dTal 2y ago>driven by a computer with the power of modern car key I appreciate the sentiment, but perhaps it is the car key which is impressive here...
- rollcat 2y agoNot necessarily. The car key seems inevitable in retrospect. Both Voyagers have had decades of opportunities for something to go irreparably wrong. Let's see if that car key will still be functional in 50 years, and then pass judgement.
- prettyStandard 2y agoAs I'm on my 3rd car key for a car I've had about 8 years. Nevermind I disassemble the key and clean the button and battery terminals.
- xboxnolifes 2y agoIf one controls an entire space ship, and the other can unlock a few doors, which is more impressive?
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- theyknowitsxmas 2y agofor 1977 I am so curious what security it has stopping a bad country from crippling it.
- pjc50 2y agoNone whatsoever, other than being obscure and very far away. Not a target of any commercial or military value.
- mysterydip 2y agoSecurity through obscurity, then :)
- exe34 2y agoyou need a very big dish
- ale42 2y agoThere are several (possibly-hostile) countries who have big dishes and big transmitters...
- RedShift1 2y agoI would be ok with going to war with a country that would do that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Crazyontap 2y agoI've often thought that simpler technology tends to be more robust because it has fewer moving parts. This might be an apples-to-oranges comparison, but I've noticed that writing vanilla PHP or JavaScript code, while harder at first, results in more robust and easier-to-debug applications. On the other hand, using frameworks, ORMs, and other abstractions can make the codebase feel brittle and harder to maintain.
- rbanffy 2y agoSimplicity at one layer might mean more complexity on others - I prefer vanilla JS when possible (and modern browsers are quite good at that), but the conceptual simplicity of PHP pushes some complexity into the template rendering, and using database APIs directly do couple you to a certain way of storing data.
- lores 2y agoAgreed, but I think there's something to be said for allowing light coupling sometimes. Anathema to "proper" design, but not uncommonly the overall complexity of a proper design makes maintenance harder, not less. I'd rather change a hardcoded SQL query than three layers of abstraction, myself; centralisation beats having to follow a trail of classes, and you always need a good test suite anyway.
- ajuc 2y agoThis is mostly because when you write from scratch you have to understand the whole control flow. Frameworks encourage learning stuff on "as-needed" basis, and you often don't know what you should know. So you do stuff on layer 3 because you can (and you already worked nearby), when it's already handled by layer 1 and reprocessed in layer 5. So you debug to see why you can't see changes and "fix" it on layer 7. And it seems to work. Repeat this over 100 changes and you create crazy mess. I've seen code that gets a list from the framework (already can't be null), checks if it's null, checks if it's empty. Makes it null if it's empty, then passes it through several more layers with null and emptiness checks on some of them, and then fails with NPE because there was no null check at n-th layer :) The person writting this code was in the proccess of adding another null check at the NPE line to "fix the problem" :) The solution was to remove all the custom code except for the final destination of that list :) I've written similarly bad code in some more complicated scenarios without realizing.
- bArray 2y agoAre there examples of modern projects with this level of attention to detail and longevity? The team that worked on this have one hell of a legacy.
- rollcat 2y agoWell "modern" and "longevity" are kinda at odds with each other, so it may depend on where you choose your arbitrary cut-off point, but I'd say OpenBSD could be one such example. They do sometimes drop support for architectures (RIP VAX), but that usually happens when the last such box in question physically dies. Otherwise they've maintained their bi-yearly release cycle and kept the system small, clean, robust, and secure for what's now decades. http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160309192510 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160309192510 Also, they are the upstream project for OpenSSH, which is among the most ubiquitous pieces of software on the planet. (Consider supporting them: https://openbsd.org/donations.html https://openbsd.org/donations.html)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ucyo 2y agoDoes anyone know what the reference points are for the rotation manoeuvres? The text does not provide any information on how the probe knows that it is off. It needs some kind of reference, no?
- perihelions 2y agoA star tracker is one of its reference points (of absolute orientation). There's also a sun sensor with a similar function. I don't know if Voyagers have others. - "In flight, the device found and locked on to the star Canopus, providing a reference for guidance and navigation." https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/star-tracker-and-hood-assembly-support-equipment-voyager-spacecraft/nasm_A19990065003 https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/star-tracker-a... ("Star Tracker and Hood Assembly Support Equipment, Voyager Spacecraft") https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/sun-sensor-and-hood-assembly-support-equipment-voyager-spacecraft/nasm_A19990065002 https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/sun-sensor-and... ("Sun Sensor and Hood Assembly Support Equipment, Voyager Spacecraft") edit: In more detail, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/43803/how-did-the-canopus-star-tracker-work-are-there-any-still-out-there-in-service https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/43803/how-did-the-...
- 1in1010 2y agoWow. The thrusters are part of the Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem(AACS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 for more great detail.
- jmclnx 2y agoThis is great, I love following the Voyagers. >When Voyager 1 lifted off to space on September 5, 1977, no one expected that the probe would still be operating today. This is kind of an odd statement :) When launched, I remember brief news broadcasts and articles in the local newspaper stating the engineers added abilities that were not approved hoping for a much longer life time. It never stated if they got in trouble. But lasting this long is quite an achievement.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pulketo 2y agoWhenever I throw out to the trash any electronic equipment sitting in my attic, sooner more than later is that I will need that equipment. It's Murphy's law.